Page 27 - Studio International - January 1969

plan, with elevation and plan echoing each When you experience his sculpture I think it's doesn't seem to be enough grit in the elements
other. Even some of the early ones had it. primarily to do with wandering around it with that he's using, and they seem to me too bland
Some of the Whitechapel sculptures were your eye; first of all looking at it from a fixed and too visual. It's where the actuality of the
really doing that multidirectional thing. position. There are these various linear or materials is contrasted against what he's doing
SCOTT : Month of May I would have thought planar confrontations which provide a kind of visually with it that they seem to be strongest.
was the first really multidirectional one. resistance to the eye, and that's the way you ANNESLEY : Yes, they're the best. When they
ANNESLEY : Month of May tended to have a think about the sculpture and experience it get really balanced you keep the physical there
front and a back, but Sculpture 2, which was even when you walk around it. And then I all the time as a kind of constant.
made at the same time, didn't have a front and think you only experience it physically as a Louw: What do you mean `physical'? In his
back at all. Wherever you were was the front. secondary thing; only by illusion perhaps do early sculptures somehow you feel they refer
TUCKER : But it had an axis actually, an axis you experience it as something particularly to the body. There are those big pieces of metal
that turned on itself. The point Roelof was physical. and you sense their weight and the fact that
making was that in contrast with David Smith, ANNESLEY : I don't agree. I think it's a physi- they're falling or tenuously balanced. But
Tony uses elements that are not specific and cal reality that remains constantly present for when you look at something like Prairie I don't
concrete in themselves, but are descriptive of you. So that this actual physical reality can think there's any of that reference to the body,
axes of direction. carry the feelings and the phenomena that and there's a new experience. You're making
Louw: Yes. But I suspect that when he starts you're seeing. It's the realness of them. He visual comparisons all the time, about open-
shaping the ground, he brings in this multi- seems to be very concerned—as most of us are— ness, closedness.
directional quality. with a certain idea about what keeps some- TUCKER : Aren't you getting back to the dis-
ANNESLEY : Even that is to do with axes. He's thing real. Press-buttons and lights and sky tinction between kinds of structure rather than
just increasing the number of axes and giving hooks and things don't keep it real. So the way kinds of material ? You said that the earlier
them equivalent importance. You can't say he makes them you can never lose the reality; sculptures mostly operated along a single axis,
which one is important enough to be called the they never go straight offinto a kind of illusion- and in the more recent ones he's been using
front or the side. istic perceptual state, where you don't see more complicated kinds of axes. In Prairie there
TUCKER : I remember a discussion we had they're real—Is it metal? What is that shim- are tubes and a big sheet with kinks in and
four or five years ago about the difference mering stuff?' You know just what it is. It's things like that that do have very particular
between perceptual and conceptual sculpture, just a piece of screen that you can find in any physical qualities. But the structure of the
in which Tony got rather heated because I builder's yard. And it's because he's using that thing overall is nothing like that of a figure. It
said he was a perceptual sculptor. I've thought that makes what you're seeing so much more abstractly makes one aware of distance and
about that quite a lot since. In other words the intense. It's that real quality of the stuff he's horizontality and of various levels, but this is
difference is really between someone who using, and its ordinariness, that makes the done physically and visually, by the play
images something in his mind and makes it, works really rich. between them. It's just that the figure thing
which is conceptual, and someone who relies TUCKER : It's like texture actually. I find his doesn't enter in very much.
on, as it were, found elements, or things in the sculptures most powerful and work best when ANNESLEY : The perceptions are much more
world, and constructs sculpture out of these there's a strong conflict between visual and like the kind of perceptions you make when
ready-made pieces. I had the idea that Tony physical. Those early sculptures when one was confronted with landscape rather than per-
was simply manipulating or juggling with any too conscious of the painted-over rust, rivets, ceptions you make when confronted with a
old pieces of found iron when the shapes of I-beams and general ship-yard connotations, figure. There's a different level of perception.
them appealed to him. But in fact the reasons were too physical for me, whereas in that You're looking at distance, height, level, where
he gave for choosing one element rather than first lot of American sculptures there just things are, their relationship over quite long
another indicated that his thinking was far
more abstract than mine was at the time. He
was choosing elements not for themselves as
David Smith would—in other words for their
internal image quality—but for their abstract
qualities of lightness, strength, and so on. He
would see abstract qualities in materials and
choose materials in order to embody those
qualities so that he could make sculptures that
have abstract qualities. In other words the
sculpture would be about lightness, about
strength, a certain kind of tension or balance,
and materials were specifically selected for this
reason. And this, thinking about it now, made
a much more abstract kind of sculpture than
any of us were doing at the time. However
conceptually you feel you're working, any-
thing that you think of comes from the world.
The more removed from world reality you
think you are, the less chance you're giving
yourself of really being able to concretely arti-
culate different elements from the world. You
know, we thought he was a kind of found-object
sculptor. I don't think he's anything like that.
ANNESLEY : Yes. It was a complete misunder-
standing.
Louw: I'd like to discuss his abstractness.